Monday, August 26, 2013

The Newpies on Paul never get it.

"Circumcision has value if you observe the law." -Paul

Yet the NPP swine are adamant that the Gospel shrugs off these "covenant boundaries" and strips them of all value. Nonsense. The Gospel never shrugs off the law, not even its so-called "peripheries" (let any brigand call circumcision a boundary with a straight face and I'll call him a stinker). The Gospel upholds the whole law and asserts its comprehensive value by presenting us with a God-man who vicariously fulfills all of it. As for us, apart from this God-man and in ourselves; we stand just as much judged by the law of circumcision as we do the law of love....the gospel has not "changed" the meaning of the law, discarding certain commands and instating others, spiritualizing a few here and casting off a few there. In point of fact circumcision would be of IMMENSE value if we kept it along with the rest of the law, which is the interpenetrative point of every command. We may even take circumcision as a sort of sign of induction; not as it separates Jew from Gentile but as it commends the whole man to God and his righteous obedience. "If we keep these commands, they will be unto us our righteousness" as Moses puts it in Deuteronomy. This is not a sociological factum but a spiritual one; both Jew and Gentile are equally commanded unto circumcision, for God summons the world unto himself by means of Abraham (and cf. Is. 56:4).

Is this to fall into the Judaizing error? Not at all. Rather we free ourselves in Christ of EVERY command; we are no longer obligated by God unto anything for anything. We are not slaves. This is not some peculiar anti-nomianism but a precise acknowledgment that everything God has ever demanded of us he has already fulfilled in us by a man other than us. Let no one accuse us of anti-nomianism. Anti-nomians forget that the law in fact must be fulfilled, that it is holy. We disavow this forgetfulness and insist upon Christ.

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